The Dying of the Light

  However. She had done the residence at the White House, taking always into account that FDR was in his wicker chair. “Lovely people,” was all she would say. “Eleanor wanted everything green. Every shade of green you can imagine. So it’s not all tea and crumpets, you see. And if you should ever hear that she and I had a little fling, well, my lips are sealed unto the grave.”

  Coming from the train, she wore a fuchsia suit, with an enormous black silk rose at her neck, covered with a long and elaborate Chinese court robe. A huge turban was held on her head with dozens of Chinese cloisonné stickpins. Her dark eyes, lined heavily with kohl, roved everywhere before she took off her dove-gray opera-length kid gloves. And she brought her wretched dog, the fat papillon Butch, to whom she gave hundreds of treats and spoke as if it were a person.

  The first thing she said was, “Babies, give me half an hour alone to poke around, see what I’m up against, then we’ll have a short talk, then I’m going to bed for three days to rest from that ghastly train ride and think about what the next steps are. First to go are the rats, I can tell you that.”

  Diana, startled, said, “We don’t have rats.”

  “Of course you do, baby. All these old piles do. I’ve already called Harry the Rat Man in Richmond. I called him from a pay phone in the train station. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

  Ash and Diana and Gibby sat in the kitchen, listening as Rose paraded through the house, occasionally lifting this or that, to look at the marks on the bottom, presumably, and then finally she rushed into the kitchen, breathless, as though the house were on fire. She came to an abrupt halt in front of Diana and stared at her for a long time.

  “Ghastly,” she said. “A desecration.”

  There was no answer sought, and none was given. She turned to Priscilla. “I would like breakfast on a tray at seven. Two coddled eggs, and black black coffee. No milk or sugar. Do you have a toast rack? Well, polish it up. And a rack of very well-done toast. At lunch, a chicken sandwich on homemade bread, the chicken sliced very thin, and whatever is being served downstairs for dinner, very hot, very hot. I will join you at table. We have a lot to discuss, but not now. I’m too devastated. Ashton, did you put a telephone in my room, as I asked? Good. I have many calls to make.”

  And so it started. Rose wasn’t satisfied with the first guest room she was offered, so another was made up for her, more to her liking, and she specifically asked that the big four-poster be removed and replaced with a single iron bed, actually Diana’s childhood bed. The finest sheets were put down on this, and out of one of her sixteen trunks, Rose pulled fantastic embroidered silk Chinese coverlets, three or four of them, and she asked for six pillows, and for the bed to be placed so that she had a direct view of the river. Beside the bed went Butch’s gigantic canopied silk dog bed, and after all this, Rose disappeared as she had said she would, although every now and then she could be seen sweeping the halls in one of several magnificent embroidered silk robes she had in her trunks, going to the kitchen to ask for a little nibble, a peach, an avocado, a bunch of grapes, all of which were out of season, but Priscilla went down to Tapphannock and came home with whatever was rare, cheeses, fruits, little amuse-bouche that she thought Rose might like. Rose liked none of it. Everything she wanted was completely unobtainable in the tiny river town. She existed on coddled eggs at seven, fried egg and bacon sandwiches with the edges cut off, which she had never had and which she adored, at one, and tea and what she called bikkies at four. Somehow, out of this, a strange friendship between Rose and Priscilla was formed, as if they were going to get dressed up and go to church together.

  Rose was something Priscilla had never seen before, kind of like a freak in a boardwalk circus. Rose would babble on about Noël Coward and Cecil Beaton and those Mitford girls, people Priscilla had never heard of, as though they were Priscilla’s friends too. But at least Rose was providing Priscilla with amusing anecdotes to tell Clarence when they lay in their big bed together at night.

  Finally, after a week, Rose’s bedroom door opened, and she emerged in full fig. She hadn’t yet begun her work, preferring to lie in her single bed, smoking the black cigarettes that Nat Sherman made only for her and which she smoked with a voluptuousness unseen since the great seraglios of the sultans. When she emerged, it was in a magnificent embroidered silk dressing gown over black silk harem pants, a black velvet turban on her head, wearing an enormous aquamarine ring that, like a good portrait, appeared to look at you from any angle.

  “How magnificent,” said Diana, overcome not just by the ring but by the whole, unlike anything she had ever seen in her life.

  “A present from the duke of Naples,” said Rose. “Heavens, could that man get you out of your clothes in a biblical minute and lay you out flatter than a salmon filet.”

  For her first night downstairs, Priscilla had pulled out all the stops, covering the table with the best food the South had to offer: a real ham, smoked, soaked for days, then cooked and glazed; yams, and collard greens, and Sally Lunn, and for dessert, a plum pudding with hard sauce.

  Rose took one tentative bite of the ham and then pushed her plate away. “This is beyond awful,” she stated, both beginning and ending the conversation on the subject of ham. She called in Priscilla. “Priscilla, dear, would you make me some of those divine fried oysters? I’ll just have that, and some of that mysterious bread.”

  After dinner, Rose and Diana and Ash and Gibby took a walk through the house. It took a long time. They didn’t argue, but every now and then Diana put her foot down when Diana felt that something Rose thought should go should definitely stay. There was, on one of the many mantels, a tall vase, broken and jagged at the top, that her mother had picked up at a yard sale in the twenties. Rose immediately consigned it to the trash pile. Diana said, “That is one of the most treasured things in the house. I don’t know why, but it is. If you asked any of the living relatives what they wanted after my death, that would be the first thing to go. It will never leave, or even move from where it is, at least in my lifetime.”

  Rose shook her head, as though she had just realized she was dealing with a crazy woman. She turned on her heel, simply saying, “Well, sadly, it’s your house.”

  When they got to the dining room, with its peeling wallpaper, Diana said, “Well, I guess this has to come down.”

  This time it was Rose’s turn to play her card. “Are you a madwoman? This is eighteenth-century Zuber wallpaper, the most precious wallpaper in the world, hand-painted. It has to be restored, not taken down. It is rare as rubies, a piece of history. I know a man . . . well, never mind, I’ve called him already. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “What is all this costing?”

  “I knew that question would come up, and your son, Ashton, expressly told me not to answer.”

  One day followed another. Rose had Clarence bring in a large wheelbarrow from the barn and, followed by Ash and Gibby and an increasing entourage of strong village boys, prowled the house, pointing with her long, thin fingers at this thing or that, picking furniture and having it moved, some to the barn, some to be given to less fortunate relatives who then spent their lives saying, “This came from Saratoga,” and some to be crated and sent to New York to be put up for auction. Diana trailed her everywhere, sometimes weeping as she saw this or that go onto the trash pile.

  One day, as it was getting dark outside and they were alone in the library, Rose suddenly turned to Diana and said, “Tell me about your life. There’s a sadness lurking in those eyes.”

  “I . . . well, it’s nothing, I guess. Nothing I would tell. We don’t much discuss our private lives down here.”

  “Bull. There’s no such thing as a private life, unless you live in a nunnery. You don’t. I see it. I see it in your eyes, in your face at dinner, a sadness, a great weariness, a great effort to keep up. I see it as though a dark brush had painted over your calm face.

  “Look at me. The Chinese coat, the rings, the turbans. Am I beautiful? No. Am I
ruthless? In my own way, yes. But I have a heart of pure gold. My heart is worth more than any maharajah’s jewel.”

  “And so . . . ?”

  “Just because you’re tormented, that doesn’t mean you can’t have a glorious life. People stare at me in the street, which I avoid as much as possible, except to walk from my door to the limousine, and I do not give a damn what they think. But I know what I see. And what I see is a woman with secrets. So if you ever want to reveal them, if you ever want to talk—and you do—every minute of every day, I will probably still be here.”

  They had begun to leave the library when Rose suddenly clutched Diana’s arm. “But make no mistake. When you tell me—and you will, you will have to—there will be no violins, no sisterly hugs, no melodramatic tears on silk, like out of some cheap romance novel. You will talk, I will listen, and, if, if, I have something to say, I’ll say it. Then we’ll part, and it won’t be brought up again.”

  “Understood,” said Diana, taken aback. “And I’m not here to pour my heart out for your amusement.”

  “So we’re clear.”

  “I understand,” said Diana, wanting to be somewhere, anywhere, else but in this darkening library with this bejeweled crazy woman at this moment.

  Just then the bell rang for dinner. Priscilla had slyly introduced Rose to crab cakes, famous on the Rappahannock. And Rose was as desperate for crab as she had been for oysters, of which she was beginning to tire. Now she wanted crab cakes all the time, and crab salad for lunch. Priscilla was a genius with a crab.

  THEY WENT INTO the dining room and took their places at the table, which had been made much smaller, because Rose believed it encouraged intimacy and conversation to be jammed together like sardines in a can. Besides, she’d taken a shine to Ash and was determined to have him, so any chance to be near him was an opportunity not to be missed, although she knew more about him than he knew she knew. The wallpaper man had come from New York. He opened his paint box, and a brand-new set of tiny sable brushes. And then he went to work, patiently, patiently, magnifying glasses slipping down his nose. The Zuber wallpaper was almost finished, and it looked magnificent. He had washed what was left of the original, rinsing away centuries of cigarette and wood smoke, so the colors were rich and true, and then, with tiny bottles of paint and the tiny sable brushes, he filled in the gaps. A Chinese woman with a parasol crossing an arched bridge to go into a lush garden to meet her lover, who lingered in a field of pale peonies, over and over, all the way up to the fifteen-foot ceiling. Even in the lowered light from the Murano chandelier, the light dimmed at Rose’s insistence—“One doesn’t want to feel as though one is dining on a baseball field at night”—it was incredible, a word her father had taught her never to use. If it’s there, he had said, it can’t be incredible. It simply is.

  Behind them, on the far wall, a fire blazed in the fireplace so large you could walk into it to scoop out the ashes without bending over.

  Rose still took her coddled eggs in bed on a tray. On her first day, she had taken care of Priscilla and Clarence by slipping them a handsome amount of money for services not yet rendered; she knew she was going to be difficult, she said, and they deserved something extra for the work she was going to require of them. There were now many servants in the house, and Priscilla and Clarence rarely left the kitchen or the garage, but Rose knew that, as in most great houses, the servants were the ones who ran everything. Harry the Rat Man seldom went home. “You have a serious infestation problem,” he had said when he arrived, and after that he kept his own counsel, putting his odd little black boxes in every corner, coming into the kitchen every morning with another rodent by the tail, as though he had won a blue ribbon at Ascot. He ate in the kitchen with the servants and slept in the gatehouse, although he considered himself a professional and not a servant. The other new servants were good-looking but inefficient young men and women from the village, in training under the watchful eye of Priscilla, who taught them everything—how to iron a blouse, how to iron a tablecloth after it had been put on the table so there was no sign of a single wrinkle, how to serve from the left and remove from the right. Most of all, she taught them that invisibility the best servants have. How to walk silently when the lady of the house nods her head, indicating they should clear the table, which they should do without making the slightest noise, no clinking of spoons, nothing that would interfere with the conversation.

  They had been lucky. In an old trunk in the attic, they had found the original plans for the house, drawn by John Arris himself and obviously done again and again, to suit the wish of some very particular and difficult man who was paying for the building. And obviously, with each drawing, the house had gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and grander and grander, until it seems the plans had been hidden away in this trunk so the busy builder could fiddle no more. They were signed and dated by him and noted in a fine hand, “FINAL.”

  “I need the big wheelbarrow. And two of the strongest boys around.”

  “That would be us,” said Gibby, putting his arm around Ash.

  “How darling of you,” said Rose. “Are you really that strong?”

  “God, we’re so strong, women faint at our touch.”

  “I would ask for a demonstration, but we haven’t the time. Besides, women and Chesterfield sofas are two very different animals. But any help will be a blessing.”

  And she got it. In one of her morning calls, she called the director of Colonial Williamsburg, the restoration of which had been finished about ten years before. Many of the craftsmen, the best in America, had lingered on, retiring to live near their masterpiece and with easy access to the glittering and endlessly fascinating water. They loved it when their grandchildren came to visit, and they could walk them through the magnificent but ultimately fake village and say, “I did that.” “I hung that wallpaper.” Or “I did all that plasterwork.” Rose got every one of them, whoever was left, to take the trip up the river and join them in the work. She paid them enormous amounts, but Ash didn’t care.

  Diana and Rose gave them the tour, pointing out every flaw, and the workers pointed out flaws that even her eagle eye had missed, and so they were ready to go to work.

  The men were too old to go to the war, which came closer and closer every day. The boys could be called up at any time, and Gibby faced it bravely and eagerly while Ash looked through his law books for ways to avoid it. Gibby wanted to fly planes, a call to death. Ash explained to anyone who would listen that he was the sole support of his mother, which was actually, now that he had fixed things, the reverse of the truth.

  The war and the renovation. They talked of nothing else.

  As Paris burned, as Europe fell, Diana chose wallpaper; she chose silks and brocades for curtains and hangings for the beds. Rose felt there were certain rooms meant for men, but that guest rooms were mostly feminine, so Diana spent hours looking through books of wallpaper, toile de Jouy, Zuber, cabbage roses, endless patterns. In her room, she didn’t want wallpaper. She knew that her bedroom was also her tomb, so she wanted a room to die in, and so she chose a silvery gray, on which there were to be painted silver medallions, and the curtains and hanging of pale silver dupioni silk shot with gold.

  The Zuber wallpaper was finished. The little man came down off the high ladder with his pots of paint and his tiny brushes, and even Ash, who knew that it would have been far cheaper just to pull it all down and replace it, had to admit it was perfect. Then Rose decided that the undistinguished woodwork that went from wallpaper to the floor, the dado, and all around the windows had to be painted. She looked through her book, and there were six books, and she finally said, “Oh, fuck it, let’s just paint it bloodred. So red it’s almost black. And then, my babies, my big gift to you: a decorator’s secret. We’re going to lacquer all the red. Just ordinary shellac. Don’t get scared. The beauty of paint is, it’s cheap and you can always paint over it.”

  When one of the Williamsburg men, a master painter, had finished, it
was spectacular in any light. It glowed like a Fabergé egg, and made the wallpaper the only thing that captivated the eye.

  Now it was time to clean house. Rose and Clarence got out her wheelbarrow again, Rose dressed somewhere between an Oriental queen and an Iowa farm woman, Chinese court skirts over denim overalls. Diana stood by her side, both excited and afraid. Nothing had been touched at Saratoga for two decades. She suddenly found its haphazard decay endearing beyond words. That was where her father sat to enjoy his Cubano after dinner. By the window, there, that was where her mother sat to read, catching the last light, although, in fact, she spent more time looking at her beloved river than at her book. It wasn’t about moving furniture. It was about upsetting the apple cart of her childhood memories, the whole memory of a family life, and the life before that, the ghosts of the men and women who had always sat in that crewelwork chair.

  And the river flowed. It flowed endlessly, different at any hour of the day. At sunset, it burst into a palette of color that, if it were painted exactly, would look cheesy and tasteless. But, looking at it, as her mother could do all day long, it was a world of wonder. Calm, she watched for the leaping of the fish, disturbing the quietude of the deep deep blue of the deepest water, thinner at the shore, becoming sandy and almost brown, ripe with oysters and crabs. And at sunset it was as if a giant card trick were being played. The blue turned purple, then mauve shot with streaks of pink, until the whole of it, the great wide whole, burst into pink streaked with a pale gray. When the water was rough, even in the slightest way, it all broke up into a crown of jewels, the cerise at the top of each wavelet so bright it burned the eyes, falling off to black at the bottom of the trough.

  And when the sun had finally set, the whole sky caught fire, sucking the color from the water, the gentlest wave a roar of light, raging against the darkness to come. The color drained, twilight set in, and the brightness of the sky turned orange and one felt as if one’s lover were leaving. It didn’t matter that the sun would rise in the morning and it would all happen all over again.